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If you REALLY wanna wipe it, take it apart, crush everything inside with a big hammer, and then burn it with the hottest stuff you got, preferably until it's just ash left. If you want to be able to use it afterwards though, you might want to have a look at this site.

bullet, sledgehammer, bucket of water, etc. The only way to be certain sure that no one can ever recover anything from it, ever. never ever. is to physically destroy the drive.

Now, that said: best way from an ease and economy v. practical security standpoint? An electromagnetic plate is the tool for the job. I used to have one when I worked in television (also useful for erasing magnetic video tapes so that no ghost of a past production winds up on your new production), but I'm not sure where an average cup-o-joe would get access to one.

Is it worth spending money? depends on how valuable the info on the drives is. If it's just browser histories and porn, whateves, hit the drive with a hammer and drop it in a bucket, but if you're a government operative with classified info-secrets, you might want to hire someone, preferably someone you can trust. I'm sure the organization you secretly work for will allow you to put that on the business expenses card, though they might already have a team who handles this kind of stuff. Ask your supervisor.

Purely anecdotal but one of my old industrial accounts was the Dundalk MD ship yard where they used to decommission old Navy ships. I sold a special grinding wheel that was inserted into a small machine that would have the optimal angle and coating to reduce fowling from the metal particles coming from the face of a hard drive platter. See, that's the first thing they did, destroyed the data before doing anything else. They would grind the face of the platter before utilizing another machine to pulverize it.

If you want to sell them/reuse them, download Darik's Boot and Nuke. Even a 10 pass wipe in there will render the data unreadable for all practical purposes. If you're feeling really paranoid, do the 35 pass guttmann wipe but be prepared for it to take days to run.

If you don't care about reusing or reselling the drive, use a drill press to bore through the platters. Hang the drive on your wall as a warning to your other hardware. "This is what happens to drives that fail me"

Amusingly enough, my first job was to destroy harddrives for a company before they sent their computers to the trash. I unscrewed the casing of the harddrives and then I used a plier to bend the discs and scratch it as much as I could. If you choose to go about it this way, there are usually atleast two really strong magnets inside of it that you can extract and play with later, I had a bunch of like 40 magnets myself when I was done.

With old hard drives from my previous laptops I just removed them, opened them up and broke that glass like disc into a million little pieces and tore out every other piece of metal on that thing. With regular HD's I remove them, disassemble them, rip each piece of metal out and then remove the discs and (time consuming) took a hacksaw and cut them into fours and then bend the hell out of each quarter with two pairs of pliers. Overkill? Maybe. Effective? Extremely.

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BlackHawkBible music connoisseurThere's no place like 127.0.0.1Icrontian

As a courier, when I delivered storage from banks to be destroyed and all they did was send it to a recycling plant and do it in front of me while I took pics. I believe they had machines specifically for it.